Anderson native recounts living through the Hurricane Katrina nightmare

This is how Deanna McLendon’s street looked in fall 2005. The piles of soggy post-Katrina debris were havens for rats.

Deanna McLendon Special to the Anderson Independent-Mail

Deanna’s father finishes installing insulation in her gutted den around Christmas time.

Deanna McLendon Special to the Anderson Independent-Mail

NEW ORLEANS - Deanna R. McLendon, 32, is a copy editor at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, which won two Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. A native of Anderson, Ms. McLendon graduated from T.L. Hanna High School and the University of South Carolina. She earned a master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached at dmclendon@timespicayune.com.

Monday, Aug. 29, 2005. K-Day.

For much of the New Orleans area, it's the day the world stopped.

Two years later, some neighborhoods are pure fossilized destruction. Homes once flooded to the eaves now sit desiccated, their occupants long gone or unable to rebuild. Tens of thousands of residents have scattered across the United States, settling in new cities.

For those rebuilding, the past two years have been stop-and-go: disturbingly slow government response amid a whirlwind of life-changing decisions; insurance headaches; FEMA trailer problems; post-traumatic stress and depression; and family and financial concerns.

It's been anything but a Carnival.

But yet, in a place known for its spirit, we are working toward our recovery — one home, one family, at a time.

THE COMING STORM

I love storms. Each hurricane season, I used to plot the named storms on a dry-erase map on my refrigerator. And since I moved to the New Orleans area in 1999, I've stayed to work during every tropical storm or hurricane threat, including Ivan, Cindy and Dennis.

But this time, it was different. After heading west across the Florida peninsula, Hurricane Katrina had grown into a gargantuan storm, filling much of the Gulf of Mexico.

A Times-Picayune manager and I owned 4-wheel-drive SUVs, and we parked them in the high-rise lot next to the Superdome on Saturday, thinking the paper would need such vehicles to negotiate post-storm debris. As I drove up the garage ramp, I noticed the fifth floor was full of hearses.

Joined by a reporter, the three of us walked back to the office, past the long line of people waiting to take shelter in the Superdome. There was a young girl, 12 or so, with a bouncy ribboned ponytail, clutching a big pillow in a cloud-pattern pillowcase. She looked like she was going to a slumber party.

The Times-Picayune's hurricane team, the reduced staff who'd cover the storm, gathered in the newsroom Saturday afternoon — expecting to work through Monday's anticipated landfall, then go home and pick up the downed branches and shingles in our yards.

People left their pets with enough food and water for two or three days, planning to return after the storm passed.

THE DEVASTATION

The smell. I've never smelled death, but I'm guessing it doesn't smell much different than a Katrina house.

My coworker's neighborhood had stewed in six feet of 17th Street Canal floodwater for five weeks. After that, his home had sat untouched for nine months.

Working as part of the "Muckrakers," a group the newspaper formed to help colleagues and others gut their ruined homes, I made what turned out to be a poor choice: I decided to clean out the pantry. Paired with a journalist visiting from New York, the two of us moved a still-bloated sack of barley — and it overwhelmed us through our masks, a stink like a backed-up bar bathroom. And the bugs — roaches and ants and unidentifiable crawling things — came streaming out at us, plague-style.

There were boxes of kids' cereal. Kitty litter. A vat of olives, the juice infused with putrid Katrina water. Once-beautiful serving plates, still in their box, forever blackened.

We worked for hours, the stronger ones hauling away cabinets and appliances, while those of us with hammers broke apart the mold-marred drywall. In the master bedroom, the shelves of a walk-in closet still held women's shoes and handbags. My coworker's wife had carefully arranged, floor to ceiling, her extensive collection — and there it remained all those months later, covered in muck. Being a shoe gal myself, I felt a lump rise in my throat.

Seven months prior, I'd removed shoe after shoe from my own home — each one stiff with mold. According to FEMA, my house took on only a maximum of five inches of water. I felt extremely lucky, compared with hundreds of thousands of other homeowners. But despite my initial joy, I quickly realized my house, like the others that flooded, still suffered from Katrina stink.

THE AFTERMATH

My dad, Dan McLendon, retired the week of Katrina. His retirement party was that day.

At one point, I got cell-phone reception inside the newspaper building and called to congratulate him. Everyone was watching CNN. He asked me what I was watching. The 100-mile-per-hour winds outside, I told him.

It was early evening when the flooding began to arrive from the levee breach to the north. By the next morning, three feet of dark water had accumulated in the parking lot, and the level was rising an inch every seven minutes. Gasoline fumes from the flooded cars outside began permeating the building. If we didn't leave immediately, we'd be stranded. So management ordered everyone onto delivery trucks and we made a hasty exit, taking only what could fit on our laps. We drove through the flood, up onto the elevated highway and out of the swamped city — past the Superdome, now with a peeled-off roof and a moat; past men carrying small children and asking for water; past unanswered fires burning in the distance.

I spent nearly two months in Baton Rouge before I moved back to my own home, and even then it wasn't really habitable. I was fortunate to have electricity very early on, and many of my neighbors were returning as well.

Very few businesses were open, and finding food proved, well, interesting. For about a week, I lived off of Gummi Bears and turkey jerky from Walgreens, and coffee from CC's.

Dad and my mom, Minerva, arrived soon after. Not realizing the extent of the damage, we all thought they might stay for two weeks, help me mop up the mess, then head back to Anderson.

My parents stayed for six weeks — and their time in Louisiana eventually totaled four months. Dad essentially rebuilt my home; I cannot effectively relay how grateful I am.

Besides the flooded house, the damage included a fallen hackberry tree — three feet thick, with a branch through my roof. Parts of the vinyl privacy fence were sprayed all over my block; Dad would later search the neighborhood, eventually recovering all but two pieces. A section of my neighbor's carport lay across my back yard, like a detached airplane wing. A large child's yard toy — weighing about 300 pounds — was tipped on its side; to this day, I don't know whose it was.

Most nights, we slept on the patio or in the carport — in a hammock, or on moldy furniture. At night, it was quiet — sometimes peaceful, sometimes eerie. There was very little traffic, other than the National Guard patrols. Dad kept a pistol, just in case.

THE LONG ROAD HOME

My initial Road Home meeting was Sept. 1, more than two years after Katrina. Road Home is Louisiana's grant program to help hurricane victims pay for repairs not covered by insurance and to encourage them to stay in Louisiana. The program, which offers grants of as much as $150,000 and has more than 180,000 applicants, has become notorious for its shortage of funds, lengthy waits for money and numerous bureaucratic entanglements.

I'd anticipated the meeting to be long and full of complicated terminology and requirements. I came with a hard plastic canister, accordion folder and three-ring binder stuffed with papers: bills; receipts; insurance claim statements; mortgage documents; FEMA information. Instead, the meeting surprisingly took just an hour. My adviser handed me a CD of all the requested documents, now scanned, and explained that I could expect a phone call in a week or two, during which I'd be assigned a time for a home assessment.

But it wasn't my experience that left the biggest impression that morning. It was this bit of conversation that drifted over from a meeting nearby:

"So here's the amount received from your homeowners insurance: $416. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

$416. Someone's road home was going to be very long.

THE RECOVERY

For Katrina victims, it's easy to feel ignored and angry when caught in a stressful, perpetual, bureaucratic wait — for the Road Home, for federal, state and local government help. It's maddening to hear the White House announce Aug. 28 that President George W. Bush planned to ask Congress for $50 billion more for the war in Iraq — and then listen to the president speak here the very next day, make no mention of his promise two years ago to "do what it takes … to make New Orleans a great city again," and instead simply defer with "We understand."

What keeps us going? Our own deep determination to make New Orleans whole again. The countless volunteers and the continuing support from people all over the United States and world. We know we haven't been forgotten and are so grateful for the ongoing help, donations and prayers.

For every story of heartbreak, there is also one of good-heartedness and charity. People across this country have opened their homes to Katrina victims, provided them with clothes and offered them jobs. They have traveled here to help us in our unprecedented cleanup.

The Anderson area is continuing to send many of its own, including my dad's friend, Roger Haskett of Easley, who recently returned from a mission trip to devastated St. Bernard Parish, where every single building flooded.

I could never say it any better than The Times-Picayune's front page on the second anniversary of Katrina:

Thank you.

Thank you for helping us. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you for remembering us.